That is while you can ignore their assembly line sheen and brutally sanded-down edges. Sometimes it can all get a little bit too much. Personally I have wearied of them a fair bit. It’s important to note that those of us who hold to this belief do not hate the Marvel movies; rather it is because we essentially love them that we wish they could do something more daring, provide something a bit more filling. The relatively weighty subject matter of Civil War came close, but fundamentally it pulled its punches. It was a damn fun movie, with some spectacular parts, but in the end it didn’t quite commit — neither stylistically nor thematically. There is no inherent reason why a superhero movie can’t do this. The Dark Knight, for example, came as close as anything to it thus far, but that’s because it was being driven by its director’s unique, contained-story vision, rather than its studio’s desire for perpetual brand extension.

Again, though, there is no inherent reason why those two ideas — creative daring and fiscal pragmatism — couldn’t co-exist more. Otherwise, even for the most diehard audience, fatigue will eventually set in. I’ve had my own punch-drunk efforts at addressing large comic book movies about their shortcomings, but now the wonderful Tony Zhou at ‘Every Frame a Painting’ has addressed one side of the matter that I hadn’t fully considered thus far: the lack of memorable scoring and the mistreatment of film score in general in Marvel (and other) modern movies.